Once upon a time, there was a Japanese monk by the name of Saicho. As the story goes, he was studying at Tiantai Mountain, in China’s Zhejiang province, in the early ninth century, when he encountered a drink that was said to be a meditation aid: tea.
The monk became so enamoured by the drink that, when he returned to Japan, he brought back not only his learnings – Saicho went on to found the Tendai school of Buddhism – but also tea seeds, which he planted around his monastery.
Years later, when the Emperor Saga came to visit and sampled tea for the first time, he too was won over and promptly ordered tea to be planted across Japan.
“That was the start of Japanese tea culture,” says Charlie Winkworth-Smith, who founded a sparkling tea brand that carries the Saicho namesake with his wife, Natalie Chiu.
Based in Hong Kong and the UK, Saicho uses cold-brewed, single-origin teas in its bottles of sparkling tea, an increasingly popular non-alcoholic alternative to wine.
The creation of the brand, which launched in December 2019, follows Chiu’s experience of feeling left out at the dinner table whenever she and Winkworth-Smith were enjoying a tasting menu.
